MY STORY

The story of my painting begins in the family kitchen.

 I was eleven years old when my mother brought me a small set of gouache, a few brushes, and a tiny canvas. While painting my first portrait, something awakened inside me a new energy, a gesture that seemed to arise on its own, as if my hands already knew what to do. That day, I discovered a new desire: to give life to figures, to bodies, to beings made of color and light to explore my own humanity by painting my own kind.

Yet it wasn’t until the age of twenty-nine that I painted my first large-format figurative work.

Between these two moments, I received academic training in visual arts while exploring other artistic forms photography, graphic design, and sculpture.

But deep down, I already knew that painting would be my primary language, the truest expression of my art. After thirteen years in Paris, I felt the need to step away to seek other horizons, other human and cultural adventures.

It was in Canada, in Winnipeg, that my first female figure, The Madone, came to life in the autumn of 2014.

Of those four years in North America, only two were dedicated entirely to art, yet they were decisive. It was during that time that I finally found my way of painting, my inner rhythm.

I took all my artistic work and returned to France to settle on the Atlantic coast near La Rochelle, determined to produce my first collection. This was followed by a long period of solitude, chosen to give birth to the fruit of my research, a series of coherent canvases in keeping with my artistic style.

But, September 12, 2016 was going to radically change my life.

As I dove into a swimming pool, my head hit the bottom so hard that it broke my neck. I couldn't move my limbs. I was totally paralyzed. My body stagnated at the bottom of the pool, unable to return to the surface. In the gravity of the water, I waited for someone to save me, my life hanging by a thread. Two hands, then two more, freed me from the bottom. I was lucky that day to be rescued from the water by my wife and a friend. Everything went very quickly: helicopter, operation, artificial coma, discharge from intensive care two months after the accident, rehabilitation for a year and a half. Verdict: I was an incomplete quadriplegic.

It was now impossible to physically paint like before!

It took years to accept and learn to live with this new body, these new physical limits.

Five years of reflection, experimentation, and adaptation were necessary to rediscover how to paint again. With the help of my partner, I developed a new way of working combining multiple techniques to regain full control over my art.

5 years of Research and Development to combine several techniques and regain complete control of my painting.

My practice became hybrid, merging everything I had learned throughout my life as an artist drawing, photography, graphic design, and painting.

The New Madonna

A new form of painting was born faithful to the soul of my earlier work, yet transformed.

It stands at the intersection of classical tradition and digital creation, between the visible and the invisible, between the the body and the resilience of the spirit.